http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce provides a nice model of parallel computation to be exploited: in a multicore chip, you can treat each core as a node with a very reliable network and fast I/O.
I thought about that before I posted but decided that it would be fun do to something for Halloween. (and I got flamed for it... but hey... it's Slashdot, if you're not stepping on any toes you're not contributing and I'm happy that some people considered it at least somewhat interesting.). Not everything with me is terrorism vs non-terrorism. I am not an "alarmist."
Apparrently the replacement rate in the US is around 2.06 (in 2000) so it's not as bad as it is in Europe-- where they have already begun some social programs to encourage people to have families. One plan in Germany that makes childless individuals pay more for nursing home premiums seems a little... discriminatory. It's not clear to me if it works this way, but if you're at retirement age and need assisted living, it's a little late for you to have and raise children to cut yourself some slack in retirement. If this punitive kind of program keeps working there, I can see it encouraging emigration of the childless-elderly.
Let's see... non-sensational, subtle and long term methods... well... you got me... they don't do it that way at all. Except maybe for long term methods... they (the religiously intolerant ones who subvert Islam for their own needs-- lets be clear...) already have decades of experience in extremist indoctrination down pat. Let's hope they never learn to become subtle.
Meh. Apple seems to be doing well enough with making the machine secure without the owner's cooperation that I can't imagine why Microsoft couldn't "innovate" some of that too.
That is the one gene that could be turned into the ultimate-slow motion terrorist weapon of genocide. Take something like HIV, and adapt it to do "gene therapy" and kill this gene for childbirth for individuals that appear to have the undesirable genetic profile of being "white caucasians" and, and... wait. Wait 100 years. Wait another 100 years. Keep releasing this virus into the wild in whatever method you care. What do you get? Eventually you get a population of people whose birthrate declines so much (we're boiling frogs here) that you outnumber them. Completely. Oh wait.. what if you happen to be a extremist who shares the genetic target? You of course make the opposite virus to reverse the change.
And they would need suicide bombers—why? Kick back, enjoy life and watch your hatred's work progress via multigenerational warfare.
They have lots of practice at it. Practice at what? They disclaim or disable the user to death. Instead of fixing the holes, they pop a dialog window and confuse the user. "Hey, some program is accessing your address book!" "You're about to enable file or printer sharing, are you sure that you want to do that? Someoone might, uh... get some files or use your printer over the network." "You're not allowed to open attachments until you find this one little checkbox and click it before we let you open attachments, because we think you're stupid." Everyone of these little dialogs is a tiny micro-EULA that users never quite read or understand.
This happens over and over and over again— with some users, I'm afraid to upgrade their software because their "world" sadly depends on the cargo cult execution of gestures to get their work done. Too many applications change how they look and feel with every upgrade that many users go off the rails whenever that happens. At least with an application, you can kind of avoid it, but when it's Windows— aw man, why not just fix the SECURITY HOLES instead of changing the UI? Please, Microsoft?
Screw it [sic; I'm being polite.], I'll keep my Mac OS X for clients and Gentoo Linux for servers and any web service that doesn't suck (Gmail, Basecamp, etc.), thank you very much.
Microsoft's days are over the moment Google decides to market an operating system that includes GFS for redundant data-storage and their MapReduce for batch processing. These things are big contributors to how its even possible for Google to exist. Simplicity trumps mediocrity.
I've always felt that there will be a time, when and if our society goes off the rails in some kind of Gattaca-like insanity, that there will be a resistant population (in both social and physiological ways) that will survive the coming pandemic (maybe birdflu will fester for years before it finally mutates and does us in) and vote the bastards that do this out of office.
Sadly, no one at the tiller seems to be thinking about the coming genetic class war, they're too busy fighting the crusade against religious extremism. We've still got some time to prepare but we're going to lose the stupid wars before then if we don't fix science education first.
Or... somewhere someone's planning a mountain retreat to wait for everything to simmer down.
Nice freebie-- very nice. A little bit DOE-centric (lots of talk about uranium) but it's good enough to get the job done. Most of these books are cram-sheets to get people "up to speed" on the concepts, so it isn't a bad thing to throw as a clueon at someone.
My father once tried to patent a car that had a wind-turbine on top to generate hydrogen for power. I knew that it wouldn't be self-generating but the idea that you could reclaim some of the energy somehow was valid-- and today, we have flywheels and regenerative braking in ugly little bloated flea-looking foreign made cars.
Perhaps the Make: people will challenge Makers for a drive-by-wire electric car-- why in the hell not? The Maker's Bill of Rights says nothing about makers not making Big Things like cars. I've always pondered why are there still recalls in the automotive industry when it's been around for what, over a 100-odd-years? Surely, the industry has accumulated enough patterns to avoid making those mistakes by now.
Reading the DOE primer on lead-acid batteries isn't a bad idea if you think that it would be fun to build an electric car.
Okay, that was wonderfully veering off topic. I'll go away now.
They enforce content filtering on the border of their access points, so while the access may be free, you may not have complete access to the "Intarweb." I was in a rush so I didn't bother looking to see how it could be circumvented, but likely you could make your own secured proxy as long as it encrypts the stream, I think the firewall also seizes on plaintext content that it recognizes as "bad."
It would be interesting to see how a LAN party would kill the wireless spectrum on the local network. As a bonus, you could chat up the cute redhead using her PowerBook if she was using iChat AV/Rendezvous.
I'm not even sure if it's Gamma now for a release that is two away from "production." Long story short, we all like to invent "cool" ways of describing the releases of software to boost prestige, because um... people are sheep who buy according to megahertz and version numbers. Can't do anything about that.
"This release is the first of two Mono 1.0 beta releases planned before our final release."
It was actually the first of two beta's so it would be the gamma release?:) Anyway, it's whatever they say it is--from my experience, Mono apps on Windows (SharpDevelop) look pretty damn good, run fast enough and the language seems to be elegant. Even if Microsoft tries to kill.NET's portability, Project Mono may grab mindshare of programmers with massive support for GNOME via C#.
Would be excellent for turn-based wargamming (think hex-grids and chiclets) or NetHack-- however, I haven't seen any indication of the displays being "interactive" yet or having any kind of wireless access. I think they're mainly focusing on the "eBook" problem, not a portable high resolution display that also works like ePaper.
Corporate customers love that warm feeling of having someone's ass at the other end of a FIXME button detonated.
Although you'd think that IBM would be more of a Red Hat supporter (would they really want support two distributions?), I think this investment probably started after the SCO fiasco launched and Novell and IBM were forced by need, to cooperate together. Novell is throwing in with Linux like IBM did a few years ago and it doesn't take make much sense to restrict the number of people working on Linux to just your own.
It's also a nice way of saying "$86M to SCO? Ok, $50M to Novell, asshats." Gorilla chess.
I say maybe because the link is to Money Magazine premium content? I could not read the article. What's with that? I could deal perhaps with a Salon permium link but not with this one.
The iPod alone isn't what will save Apple, Apple saves Apple with everything Apple does. (In Soviet Russia, Apple saves iPod!?) I know a lot of people who have started making the switch with laptops from Apple. I'd consider it myself but I don't have the luxury money for that yet.
I remember watching the MacWorld keynote when Jobs introduced the iMac and iPhoto (IIRC)-- he explained what they were trying to do with the "digital hub." Apple is not going to go away anytime soon-- they are seriously committed to creating the best home computers possible for the general public. It looks like they're calling it "iLife" and they are trying to create tools to simplify everything in life, unlike Microsoft which seems wholy committed to making each and every new release more complicated and harder to use. Apple seems to follow Pareto's rule and gets you 80% of everything you need well without making it complicated and this keeps the maczealots insanely happy and recruits new customers.
Free advice to Steve Jobs to help kick Microsoft's collective ass: create iPostage, an application that makes it impossibly easy to buy and print postage from the USPS and you'll create another compelling use for Mac OS X for business to switch. I know from everyone who has ever tried to go the postage-via-computer route has suffered with lost postage because of bad printings, confusing dialogs and just generally hard to use software.
Is there *ANY* mobile service provider that exists that doesn't get widespread reports of bad customer service, poor signal strength/coverage? This kind of statement doesn't really help me because I have heard it said about any provider that they "suck" or have bad coverage, etc. Personally, I've never had a problem with T-Mobile's customer service but I have had occassional coverage problems where I have dropped or garbled calls.
I'm definitely considering the prepay option. The biggest annoyance is the "decaying" prepaid card syndrome, where if you don't use your card within a number of days it's value declines. I have some serious ideological issues with that.
And I haven't even changed my serivce yet. I got a letter yesterday saying my monthly rate from T-Mobile was now $10 cheaper. More competition is driving prices down more. Now I just need a plan that costs $20/mo instead of $49/mo.
This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .
I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:
1. Background. In 1998, the United States sued Microsoft, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Microsoft had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems ("OSs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for internet browsers, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer ("IE") browser. The court ordered Microsoft to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an OS business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 45.
becomes something like:
1. Background. In 2006, the United States sued Google, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Google had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for personal content management systems ("blogs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for search engines, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its search engine and its journaling ("blog") software. The court ordered Google to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an search engine business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Google, 253 F.3d at 45.
The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.
I had a 386DX like 8 years and I hated the beige, so I painted it flat-black with some bronze-fleck-- NOW, if I could do it again... I'd paint all my computers this color in a heart-beat.
The only good color for a computer is black, witness the IBM AS/400's and ThinkPads. Think about it, have you *EVER* seen a ThinkPad that wasn't black?
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce provides a nice model of parallel computation to be exploited: in a multicore chip, you can treat each core as a node with a very reliable network and fast I/O.
l s/mpi/ or a nice collection of learning materials at: http://www.hlrs.de/organization/par/par_prog_ws/ .
m p/openmp_content.html
Don't like MapReduce and want something more... heterogenous... you could use PVM: http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/ ; which later became MPI: http://www.hlrs.de/organization/par/services/mode
Want something from Sun? OpenMP: http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/articles/open
I think that we have the software to do it, already, yes.
Apparrently the replacement rate in the US is around 2.06 (in 2000) so it's not as bad as it is in Europe-- where they have already begun some social programs to encourage people to have families. One plan in Germany that makes childless individuals pay more for nursing home premiums seems a little... discriminatory. It's not clear to me if it works this way, but if you're at retirement age and need assisted living, it's a little late for you to have and raise children to cut yourself some slack in retirement. If this punitive kind of program keeps working there, I can see it encouraging emigration of the childless-elderly.
Let's see... non-sensational, subtle and long term methods... well... you got me... they don't do it that way at all. Except maybe for long term methods... they (the religiously intolerant ones who subvert Islam for their own needs-- lets be clear...) already have decades of experience in extremist indoctrination down pat. Let's hope they never learn to become subtle.
Its fun to be anonymous, is all.
Meh. Apple seems to be doing well enough with making the machine secure without the owner's cooperation that I can't imagine why Microsoft couldn't "innovate" some of that too.
No, if you wanted to drag intelligent design into it... you could say... this is God's implementation of fork().
LOL. I stopped watching SG-1 like three years ago after it got a little... ridiculous. Didn't see that one. :)
And they would need suicide bombers—why? Kick back, enjoy life and watch your hatred's work progress via multigenerational warfare.
This happens over and over and over again— with some users, I'm afraid to upgrade their software because their "world" sadly depends on the cargo cult execution of gestures to get their work done. Too many applications change how they look and feel with every upgrade that many users go off the rails whenever that happens. At least with an application, you can kind of avoid it, but when it's Windows— aw man, why not just fix the SECURITY HOLES instead of changing the UI? Please, Microsoft?
Screw it [sic; I'm being polite.], I'll keep my Mac OS X for clients and Gentoo Linux for servers and any web service that doesn't suck (Gmail, Basecamp, etc.), thank you very much.
Microsoft's days are over the moment Google decides to market an operating system that includes GFS for redundant data-storage and their MapReduce for batch processing. These things are big contributors to how its even possible for Google to exist. Simplicity trumps mediocrity.
Sadly, no one at the tiller seems to be thinking about the coming genetic class war, they're too busy fighting the crusade against religious extremism. We've still got some time to prepare but we're going to lose the stupid wars before then if we don't fix science education first.
Or... somewhere someone's planning a mountain retreat to wait for everything to simmer down.
My father once tried to patent a car that had a wind-turbine on top to generate hydrogen for power. I knew that it wouldn't be self-generating but the idea that you could reclaim some of the energy somehow was valid-- and today, we have flywheels and regenerative braking in ugly little bloated flea-looking foreign made cars.
Perhaps the Make: people will challenge Makers for a drive-by-wire electric car-- why in the hell not? The Maker's Bill of Rights says nothing about makers not making Big Things like cars. I've always pondered why are there still recalls in the automotive industry when it's been around for what, over a 100-odd-years? Surely, the industry has accumulated enough patterns to avoid making those mistakes by now.
Reading the DOE primer on lead-acid batteries isn't a bad idea if you think that it would be fun to build an electric car.
Okay, that was wonderfully veering off topic. I'll go away now.
Of course, I merely opened the door for my own come-uppance, you walked right through it. :)
They enforce content filtering on the border of their access points, so while the access may be free, you may not have complete access to the "Intarweb." I was in a rush so I didn't bother looking to see how it could be circumvented, but likely you could make your own secured proxy as long as it encrypts the stream, I think the firewall also seizes on plaintext content that it recognizes as "bad."
It would be interesting to see how a LAN party would kill the wireless spectrum on the local network. As a bonus, you could chat up the cute redhead using her PowerBook if she was using iChat AV/Rendezvous.
Oh, CowboyNeal approved it?
Can he take a really long vacation?
Fire the person who approved this story. There's a clear reason why the submitter was anonymous: this product is complete bullsh*t.
I'm not even sure if it's Gamma now for a release that is two away from "production." Long story short, we all like to invent "cool" ways of describing the releases of software to boost prestige, because um... people are sheep who buy according to megahertz and version numbers. Can't do anything about that.
It was actually the first of two beta's so it would be the gamma release? :) Anyway, it's whatever they say it is--from my experience, Mono apps on Windows (SharpDevelop) look pretty damn good, run fast enough and the language seems to be elegant. Even if Microsoft tries to kill .NET's portability, Project Mono may grab mindshare of programmers with massive support for GNOME via C#.
Would be excellent for turn-based wargamming (think hex-grids and chiclets) or NetHack-- however, I haven't seen any indication of the displays being "interactive" yet or having any kind of wireless access. I think they're mainly focusing on the "eBook" problem, not a portable high resolution display that also works like ePaper.
Corporate customers love that warm feeling of having someone's ass at the other end of a FIXME button detonated.
Although you'd think that IBM would be more of a Red Hat supporter (would they really want support two distributions?), I think this investment probably started after the SCO fiasco launched and Novell and IBM were forced by need, to cooperate together. Novell is throwing in with Linux like IBM did a few years ago and it doesn't take make much sense to restrict the number of people working on Linux to just your own.
It's also a nice way of saying "$86M to SCO? Ok, $50M to Novell, asshats." Gorilla chess.
I say maybe because the link is to Money Magazine premium content? I could not read the article. What's with that? I could deal perhaps with a Salon permium link but not with this one.
The iPod alone isn't what will save Apple, Apple saves Apple with everything Apple does. (In Soviet Russia, Apple saves iPod!?) I know a lot of people who have started making the switch with laptops from Apple. I'd consider it myself but I don't have the luxury money for that yet.
I remember watching the MacWorld keynote when Jobs introduced the iMac and iPhoto (IIRC)-- he explained what they were trying to do with the "digital hub." Apple is not going to go away anytime soon-- they are seriously committed to creating the best home computers possible for the general public. It looks like they're calling it "iLife" and they are trying to create tools to simplify everything in life, unlike Microsoft which seems wholy committed to making each and every new release more complicated and harder to use. Apple seems to follow Pareto's rule and gets you 80% of everything you need well without making it complicated and this keeps the maczealots insanely happy and recruits new customers.
Free advice to Steve Jobs to help kick Microsoft's collective ass: create iPostage, an application that makes it impossibly easy to buy and print postage from the USPS and you'll create another compelling use for Mac OS X for business to switch. I know from everyone who has ever tried to go the postage-via-computer route has suffered with lost postage because of bad printings, confusing dialogs and just generally hard to use software.
Is there *ANY* mobile service provider that exists that doesn't get widespread reports of bad customer service, poor signal strength/coverage? This kind of statement doesn't really help me because I have heard it said about any provider that they "suck" or have bad coverage, etc. Personally, I've never had a problem with T-Mobile's customer service but I have had occassional coverage problems where I have dropped or garbled calls.
I'm definitely considering the prepay option. The biggest annoyance is the "decaying" prepaid card syndrome, where if you don't use your card within a number of days it's value declines. I have some serious ideological issues with that.
And I haven't even changed my serivce yet. I got a letter yesterday saying my monthly rate from T-Mobile was now $10 cheaper. More competition is driving prices down more. Now I just need a plan that costs $20/mo instead of $49/mo.
This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .
I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:
becomes something like:The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.
I had a 386DX like 8 years and I hated the beige, so I painted it flat-black with some bronze-fleck-- NOW, if I could do it again... I'd paint all my computers this color in a heart-beat.
The only good color for a computer is black, witness the IBM AS/400's and ThinkPads. Think about it, have you *EVER* seen a ThinkPad that wasn't black?
Enough said. :)